Brian Riedl is The Heritage Foundation's lead budget analyst and has built a solid reputation for interpreting, explaining and reforming the often arcane realm of federal budget policy.
Indeed, much of the current backlash against runaway federal spending can be attributed to Riedl's work. As far back as 2002 and 2003, his writings exposed the beginnings of a federal spending spree that was pushing real federal spending to more than $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II.
In December 2003, Riedl – Heritage's Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs – quickly revealed the omnibus spending bill's 8,000 pork projects, including funding for the Please Touch Museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In 2006, the Senate increased President George W. Bush's war funding bill with $14 billion in unrelated domestic spending. Riedl's writings exposing this irresponsible spending, including Mississippi's "railroad to nowhere" received extensive media coverage, and the ensuing public backlash forced Congress to strip the $14 billion from the bill.
In 2010, Riedl was named a recipient of the Forward under 40 award, presented by the Wisconsin Alumni Association to graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who are "making a real difference" while still in their 30s.
Riedl's budget research has been featured in front-page stories and editorials in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. He has discussed budget policy on NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. He also participates in the bipartisan "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour," which holds town hall meetings across America focusing on the looming crisis in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
In addition to overall spending trends, Riedl targeted the 2002 farm bill, which distributed most of its $180 billion bounty to wealthy agri-businesses. In an op-ed essay published in dozens of newspapers nationwide, Riedl noted that "farm subsidies are America's largest and most expensive corporate welfare program." So effective were his criticisms that, weeks after the farm bill was enacted, the U.S. Agriculture Department felt it necessary to publish a 12-page report that tried to address many of the concerns Riedl had raised.
Riedl also contributes to Heritage's welfare research. In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Riedl wrote that "Welfare recipients assigned to immediate work see their earnings increase more than twice as fast over the following five years as those first placed in education-based programs." In another study, he debunked the myth of a child care crisis by showing that funding has more than tripled since 1996, leaving very few truly needy families without access to child care assistance.
Before coming to Heritage in 2001, Riedl worked for then-Gov. Tommy Thompson, former Rep. Mark Green (R-WI)., and the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly. Riedl holds a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from the University of Wisconsin, and a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University.